Letting oneself be interrogated by events” “

The first war that came to us live on TV was the war in Vietnam. Then with the armed conflict in Iraq – that decreed the world-wide success of CNN – people even talked of “turning the war into a TV show”. After the conflict in the Balkans, something has changed. And in Afghanistan, the profession of the foreign correspondent has become even impossible. Little hard news, unreliable sources, danger of information being exploited for propaganda purposes. And anyone who tries to learn more about what is actually going on, risks his life. That’s what happened to three journalists (two French and one German) in Afghanistan a few days ago. We spoke about the matter with Jean Bianchi , expert in communication and lecturer in the Catholic University of Lyons. What strikes you about the information reaching us from Afghanistan? “The media coverage of the events has so far been very disappointing, especially due to the lack of opportunity for journalists to travel to the areas where the war is actually being waged. Information in fact mainly reaches us from correspondents based in Pakistan who draw on news reports provided by sources that are not always reliable and that give a not very exact picture of what is really happening in Afghanistan. The problem is that when the media have neither news to offer, nor sources to draw on, they still continue to be there, they still need to justify their presence. And so, in the absence of proper reportage from the war front, recourse is had to experts or to more veteran journalists who have been in Afghanistan in the past, but who now live in Paris or Rome. So it’s an information that says little or nothing about what is actually happening in the field; it gives more space to analysis than to reportage. Of course, the reflections in question are not entirely useless, because they draw on the recent history of the country, but undoubtedly they don’t guarantee any exact coverage of events as they unfold”. There’s a big difference with what happened in Iraq… “It should be said that it’s not the same war. The parties in the conflict are not the same, the same military hardware is not being used. We also need to bear in mind that journalists have become a little more prudent and critical. Professionally speaking, armed conflicts are the most difficult events of all to cover. In the field there are the military operations and the diplomatic strategies whose protagonists are not always able or willing to tell everything they know and do. But in war there is also a third theatre of action and it is that of the media in which soldiers, politicians and even terrorists intervene to say things so that they are made public (and this is propaganda) or to issue disinformation, i.e. news that is plausible but false, with the aim of deflecting attention”. Why then – if it’s so difficult – are the youngest journalists sent into the field while the seasoned experts remain at home? “I wouldn’t be so harsh in judgement. I would say rather that there are many young journalists – and I understand them – who have an ardent wish to go to the theatre of the war. Because they think that to go and see what is really happening is the most interesting part of their job. The French and German journalists who died in Afghanistan were really people passionate about their own profession. The media world is full of individuals who have dignity and courage and are ready to risk their lives. Those who remain at home and have experience as foreign correspondents behind them may, however, help to discern the disinformation and forms of propaganda”. Could you give one piece of advice to journalists and one to our readers? “When journalists have nothing to go on, they are tempted to imagine the future, in other words to make hazardous predictions about what might happen instead of letting themselves be humbly interrogated by the facts. Understanding the sense of what is happening is an arduous task, but there are no alternatives: the journalism that succumbs – in the absence of news – to guesswork or to intellectual speculation is dangerous. The reader, on the other hand, has the difficulty of being confronted by a mass of information. So it’s important that he should be able to preserve a critical spirit about what he is reading or seeing. The reader ought, in other words, always to pose questions, to compare what he hears and sees with what he already knows and ask himself whether the news he is getting is satisfactory or not”. Maria Chiara Biagioni